A protein in the pancreas is giving researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine their first chance at cracking the code that determines how diabetes develops during pregnancy, a finding that could lead to new treatments for all forms of diabetes.

Mars, like Earth, is a climate-fickle water planet. The main difference, of course, is that water on the frigid Red Planet is rarely liquid, preferring to spend almost all of its time traveling the world as a gas or churning up the surface as ice. That's the global picture literally and figuratively coming into much sharper focus as various Mars-orbiting cameras send back tomes of unprecedented super high-resolution imagery of ever vaster tracts of the planet's surface.

What were just a few years ago small hints about Mars' water and climate, as seen in a few "postage-stamp" high-resolution ... Read Full Article

How the gene that has been pegged as a major risk factor for schizophrenia and other mood disorders that affect millions of Americans contributes to these diseases remains unclear. However, the results of a new study by Hopkins researchers and their colleagues, appearing in Cell, provide a big clue by showing what this gene does in normal adult brains.

Scientists have discovered a new enzyme involved in the degradation of proteins inside cells, a process that helps eliminate or recycle proteins that are no longer needed. The unexpected discovery, made by Marcus Groettrup, chair of the immunology department at the University of Constance, Konstanz, Germany, and colleagues, overthrows the idea that protein degradation is initiated by only one enzyme. Read Full Article

Injection drug users are still at a very high risk of acquiring hepatitis C (HCV) and hepatitis B (HBV); however, needle-sharing is less common, and users do not become infected as quickly as they did in the past, according to a new study in the September issue of Hepatology, a journal published by John Wiley & Sons on behalf of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD). The Read Full Article